Quake Live Open Beta On Tuesday

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It looks like all those folks who didn’t get into the closed beta will finally be able to taste the latest version of the finest deathmatch game of them all time. Via ESReality: “We’re opening QUAKE LIVE to the general public as an open beta the evening of Tuesday, February 24th.” The teaser splash page at the Quake Live site confirms it.

Try playing UT now and tell me there isn’t something distinctly unpleasant about the mousing. Something like a 2/60th second input lag. Its just there at the very edge of perceptibility. Once you see it, you can’t not see it. That kind of thing is why modern games are better than old games.

I’m more into UT than Q3, but they both have their strong points. UT is so different from match to match, and the weapons are pretty kickass. Q3 is a different kind of awesome, with more skill-based speed play.

Been playing the beta for a while, stopped playing after three ‘rage quits’, although that didn’t have much to do with the game itself. The people on the servers I joined were just too fast and accurate for me(only weapon I could get back at them with was the gauntlet). It has been a while since I played Quake III arena, but I’d say they did a very good job at remaking it in a web format.

Oh, what a load of bull. I just got my closed beta invite yesterday (I signed up for it 4-5 months ago), and I still can’t even play it because my windows install is corrupted and it refuses to work in Linux.

I’m excited to see the influx of new blood. The closed beta has been essentially populated by people who never stopped playing q3. While that was a good thing to get the weapon and map balance in order, it wasn’t very fun to be consistantly stomped in duels. The new netcode, balance changes, and the shiny new web interface should breathe some new life into the old game.

I have a longstanding ultimatum that PCGUK publishes a written apology in full for incorrectly asserting that Unreal Tournament and Quake III were, repsectively, empirically eight and ten percent better than this monument – this landmark – this monumental landmark of online multiplayer murder simulation competitive hand/eye-coordinate fun.

“Try playing UT now and tell me there isn’t something distinctly unpleasant about the mousing. Something like a 2/60th second input lag. Its just there at the very edge of perceptibility. Once you see it, you can’t not see it. That kind of thing is why modern games are better than old games.”

It could just as easily be your computer; I had something like that when I played Quake 2 recently and put it down to the game (and it was incredibly annoying), then I tried it on another computer and the input was perfect.

“Try playing UT now and tell me there isn’t something distinctly unpleasant about the mousing. Something like a 2/60th second input lag. Its just there at the very edge of perceptibility. Once you see it, you can’t not see it. That kind of thing is why modern games are better than old games.”

Nope. Play it to this day (not very often, mind) and it’s still one the greatest games ever.

Just a disclaimer: while I have a great deal of experience with UT, my experience with Quake 3 is limited to having played the demo once back when it came out. So take my claims of UT superiority with a grain of salt. ;)

Man, all I know is that was the only map I ever really liked playing and have yet to find a map in any other game I enjoy playing more. Though I suppose, seeing as I was 9 years old at the time, the fact that it was a pretty simple map appealed to me.

ut is fun for different reasons, but quake is more competitive / more “hardcore” and has more lasting value. and lol @ whoever said quake trying to clone ut… other way around

anyways, open beta should be good for people who haven’t played quake for the past 5 or 10 years like most of the guys active in the beta. i don’t know what the exactly the nda prohibits, but let’s just say a huge percentage of accounts left before 1 hour of playtime.

If you are getting input lag then stop playing with a wireless mouse.
Same goes for a wireless keyboard.

Seriously when it comes to multiplayer shooters the best thing you can do is go old tech.
CRT monitors and low resolutions [640×480] with wired mouse and keyboard.
I was a bit too into into shooters back in the day.

Biz: As I understood it, he meant team arena with the “trying to clone ut”-thing(which is still bullshit, because ta was obviously mostly expanding on rune ctf from q2, as far as I can tell). q3 came out two months after ut, so i don’t think anyone would suggest that.

As for target demographic, there is no reason yet to make a switch for any of the players who are currently still playing q3 mods, as the games featureset is far from competition-ready.

I think the biggest concern is that especially tdm and ctf hugely suffer from poor maps, as of course most of the refined, competition-proven ones are not id Softwares property, let’s hope they find some way to contact some of the mappers and get permission to include them in quake live.

Best fun I had with UT99 back in the day was in Fractal duels. We learned to use the bottom teleporter trap to our advantage –if you fall into it with rotation momentum you can get it to teleport you up but not gib you, and from there you can get the health and rockets below you in the middle ring. This is much faster than going to take the facing elevators up (which also were perfect places to get 5 timed rockets in the face the moment you got up if you were playing against anyone good). The only problem with that map was that anyone worth their salt were counting the seconds before the armor belt spawned again, so the middle fight got a bit predictable.

oh yes, let’s fight like it’s 1999. UT was much better than Q mainly due to the better guns. You could shoot around corners with the flak!! :D

Ah, memories.

I don’t think I’ll try QLive because I’m not good enough for it and I bet there are people there that never stopped playing the original that are humbling everybody.

Just to make it clear people, there are skill tiers in this Quake Live. You can’t play below your tier! After playing for a week or two hopefully all the good players will be in tiers 1-3 and unable to give you grief.